Tips For Creating A Strong, SEO-Friendly Twitter Community From Nestivity CEO Henry Min

Nestivity is an innovative tool that enhances a brand, business or individual’s Twitter conversations. Rather than having one-off, short-lived exchanges of information, Nestivity enables users to actually engage their audience in ongoing, meaningful conversations. Discussions on Nestivity are threaded and archived, so they’re not only easy to follow, but they show up via search as well—a bonus for businesses looking for ways to get the most SEO-juice out of their social media efforts.

This week, Nestivity is moving out of Beta into its 1.0 release, and will be focused even more on augmenting the customer relations experience on Twitter.

I had the opportunity to chat with Henry Min, CEO of Nestivity, about what makes a strong social community, how Nestivity helps SEO, and tips for getting people engaged in social conversations.

What can grouped Twitter conversations do for a brand?

Grouping Twitter conversations helps brands show that they’re actually listening—and responding—to their followers. For example, a customer might suggest improvements to a Beta product, and that feature gets incorporated into the next product release. Wouldn’t it be nice if that company could show that customer and all their other followers that they heard the suggestion and took action as a result? By grouping conversations together and saving them, brands can point to this exchange of ideas as social proof of their relationship with their customers.

Or, take a company like Binny’s Beverage Depot for instance. They might be seeing the same tweet from different customers over and over again: “Where’s the nearest Binny’s to me?” Rather than answering this question repeatedly, which uses up valuable human resources and company time, they could group all similar questions into a FAQ that’s searchable by any customer with a similar question.

And what about those resounding accolades your company sees on Twitter—the happy customers, the common questions, the superior customer service? You want to be able to highlight them and share them with your community. Making these exchanges highly visible and easy to find by others is one of the main benefits of a grouped Twitter conversation.

How does Tweetcast work with heavy media such as video?

It works brilliantly!

Video is a great media type to be used in a Tweetcast. A lot more can be communicated via moving sounds and images in ten seconds than say in what you can Tweet in the same timeframe.

It’s easy to integrate video from sites like YouTube and Vimeo into Nestivity communities. You just grab the link from wherever your video is hosted, and share it during a Tweetcast or as an attachment to an ongoing discussion.

How can saving and publishing twitter conversations help SEO?

Grouping tweets by discussion topic allows the conversation to become just as searchable and as rich contextually as blog post content.

Topics in the discussions, as well as all links auto-generated to thread community discussions, take you to the community owner’s discussion page. What appears in the search results is a link to the group’s conversation, rather than to an often out-of-context tweet or short exchange.

Kristi Hines, for instance, recently asked, “Who’s going to the AllTwitter Marketing Conference” and her discussion post on her Twitter community appears on page one of Google results, just after Media Bistro and CMO.com’s posts.

Grouping discussions around the things your customers want to know, or you suspect they will want to know, helps them find your discussions not just via your community on Twitter, but via Google as well.

What are your tips for getting the conversation flowing?

Any great conversation has to have a purpose. Give your audience a reason to participate in your Tweetcast or ongoing dialogue. Marketing 101: have a strong theme that participants will be able to easily identify. If the theme resonates, they’ll be intrinsically interested in the content being shared.

Also, vibrant conversations usually have an effective catalyst. This could be a Q&A with the CEO, a celebrity or influential moderator, or a controversial take on an issue. Whatever your catalyst is, make sure it’s something that will entice your community to actually participate in your conversation.

Another tip is to invite your friends, family, and colleagues to join. Everyone has a go-to group that they can ask to join in, so tap into them!

Be sure to share the link to your Nestivity community on your Twitter profile, your Google+, and your Facebook page. It’s basically the same strategy that you would use on your blog. You’d post the link to your social profiles and say “Hey world, here’s my conversation, come join it.”

Something else you could do is to @mention certain individuals that you think are relevant to the discussion you’re having, so the discussion shows up on their radar.

Using hashtags is another great tip. If your community is talking about social change for instance, they might be using popular hashtags like #SocialGood and #4change—by using these yourself, you’ll tie your community discussion to the larger Twitter community.

Give me one or more examples of using Nestivity in real life?

I’ll give you two. Last weekend New York University welcomed the class of 2017 to join an hour long Q&A Tweetcast, during which incoming freshman tweeted questions to a panel of returning students and recent alumni about the NYU experience and how to prepare for it. Panelists participated in the Tweetcast via Google+; the moderators guided the discussion using slides and graphics; and students asked questions on Twitter—all on a single screen at http://hashtagnyu.nestivity.com/public.

And naturally, the design and build of Nestivity has been informed by ongoing, real world feedback by our community members at http://Nestivity.nestivity.com/public since day one. We listen to our Twitter community and continually make product enhancements. Community members’ stories and feedback fueled our momentum. It’s been a fast, furious and exhilarating journey—and it’s only just beginning! Market response to Nestivity’s Beta program has been exceptional, with nearly 5,000 signups to date. We plan to release version 1.0 this week.